When I woke up this morning and did and I Ching reading, I was not expecting to survey my atheism. I learned from an early age to keep my atheism a secret. Other children made fun of me when I unwisely shared, or possibly even gloated, about my disbelief in god. If it was gloating, then I was trying out a posture of my father's. Also raised without religion by his atheist father and unobservant Jewish mother, he scorns religion. Growing up, it was something for us to ridicule and look down on. He was in step with the famous atheists of his time: the Hitchenses and Dawkinses who espoused a bull-headed, holier-than-thou atheism of the early 2000s. Y2K had been a bust and publishers were eager for controversial hits that pilloried foolish believers. Books like The God Delusion were supposed to make me feel better by sticking it to my religious bullies, but Dawkins' tone, his rabid Islamophobia, and his overwhelming desire to cast shade on religion turned me off. I was embarrassed to cast my lot in with him by claiming atheism in public. I was no longer afraid of ridicule by my peers for my disbelief, but I didn't want to be seen as belonging to a tribe of racist, short-sighted men. Interestingly, my best role model for this has come from my Christian bookseller friend, who runs my favorite used bookstore in Portland and displays his "Christians Against Christian Nationalism" sticker behind the register. If he can find room for his own convictions in the face of an ideology that purports to represent his interests but fails spectacularly, then probably I can, too.
Atheism for me has always been intensely personal. It has nothing to do with what other people believe or don't. For Dawkins and others like him, the fact that anyone believes in a god is an affront. But it's not to me. I've come to adopt the term 'spiritual atheist' as an indicator of my softer stance, even though I'm not sure what I mean by this. I'm not preoccupied with how other people structure their beliefs—no, that's not quite true. As a writer I'm intensely interested in the inner world, of myself and others, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. And ever since reading The Tao of Pooh (considered cringe now, I know, but as a tween in the 90s it was a revelation to me) I've read and remained interested in Taoism and certain aspects of Zen Buddhism as they relate to structuring one's inner world and one's responsibility to others.
(Growing up in a large square house with a mansard roof on Main Street in a small town, my father let half of the ground floor to a professor of Eastern Religions at the local university. This was a totally separate apartment which was at some point walled off from the rest of the house at the bottom of the stairs behind a large gold-framed mirror. This disconnected but structurally necessary component of the house I grew up in is an accurate depiction of the place in my own mind where Taoism and Buddhism sit in relation to my atheism and my sense of self. Important and at times beautiful, nourishing aspects of the world that I draw on, without ever completely adopting them wholesale, and that have had little impact on my continued disbelief and atheism.)
Most atheist stories include a moment of realization or a period of weakening faith. I lack this. My mother was raised Catholic, my paternal grandmother Jewish, though both disobeyed mandates for how they ought to have behaved. My father, as mentioned, is much more an atheist of the turn of the 21st century, convinced that the root of all war and evil is religion and not imperialist greed, colonial violence, and a fear of the other stoked by racist politicians. It's a bourgeois atheism deeply invested in the continued functioning of capitalism, the importance of class difference, and accumulation of wealth. It has no need for humility and a relationship to the unknown. My father's atheism is one in which everything can be known or figured out. It has no time for mystery or doubt. To brook doubt as an atheist is to rub uncomfortably up against that dirty word 'agnositicism.' But this is no danger for me, because even if there were a god, I would not believe in him.
This reflects a fundamental difference in how I understand the word belief. It is not simply a matter of existence—is she, is she not. Rather, it's a choice about who I throw my weight behind. And I will always throw in with the weak, the vulnerable, the besieged. In such a light, my atheism is as much about my fundamental position toward power as it is about god. In this I suspect it's much closer to a communist atheism, though I'm not yet so educated about that denomination, if you will.